GUEST BLOG: Duncan Law, Biofuelwatch
What are you doing for Earth Day, Wednesday 22 April?
Join Biofuelwatch in London, 11.00-13.00, the Grocer’s Hall, Princes St, EC2R 8AD, at #AXEDRAX, for a lively protest to expose and oppose burning biomass and coal. For forests, communities and the climate, it’s time to #axedrax!
#AXEDRAX will unite Coal and Biomass campaigners with others who believe that UK energy policy is stupid and unjust.
BIO-ENERGY SUBSIDIES ENABLE THE BURNING OF MORE COAL
I attended the powerful Divestment Day demonstration at the Polyp Bureau otherwise known as City Hall on the south bank near Tower Bridge. There was a disturbing proliferation of Borises and a great prevailing of common sense about the need to keep 80% at least of fossil fuels in the ground.
Once we had spelled Divestment out to the powers that be (it was too cold to demonstrate it with our clothes) hundreds of people adjourned to nearby amphitheatre to hear moving and motivating speeches from affected community representatives and campaigners. Powerful stories from Colombia where the Cerrejon mine, the biggest open cast mine in the world, sprawls over more than 600 square kilometers displacing people and killing them with dust. In Bangladesh a British coal company wants to mine high quality coal exporting 90% of it, mostly to fuel our power sector.
COAL RIDING ON THE BACK OF ‘RENEWABLES’
I reflected that Drax Power Station, the biggest coal burner and carbon emitter in the UK consumes some of that Colombian coal. But Drax has recently become the biggest biomass burner in the world. It was due to close in the near future because of EU sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions regulations. Burning wood was a huge opportunity for them (and E.on and RWE other big coal operators) as it allowed them to come under the SO2 limits (as wood contains less sulphur than coal) and continue to burn coal, whilst receiving vast ‘renewable energy subsidies’ till 2027. So the renewable subsidies that Drax lobbied so hard for enable it to continue burning 3 million tonnes of coal a year until 2027. That is not renewable nor low carbon!
From 2016 Drax Power Station stands to get £657m year to burn imported trees at less than 40% efficiency to make electricity, driving deforestation, biodiversity loss, toxic local pollution and increased climate emissions. DECCs own Biomass Carbon Calculator shows that some of their feedstock is up to 3 times worse than coal when all the emissions associated with logging are taken into account. So this meets neither climate nor conservation, nor pollution, nor energy security goals. It does however meet our EU Renewable Energy Targets of 15% of primary energy from renewables by 2020 which are completely, idiotically, decoupled from carbon saving or energy efficiency targets! It also helps ‘keep the lights on’ – that old-think phrase that presupposes that current demand must be met rather than reduced. But it is a colossal waste of money and energy.
INVEST TO SAVE
When Drax was built campaigners calculated that the capital investment could insulate East Anglia, saving the amount of energy Drax would produce every year. Yet Drax was built to waste energy for 40 years. History is about to repeat itself.
According to International Energy Agency figures, spend the ~£657m a year subsidy on energy saving and you could remove the need for Drax by 2020! People would be warmer, healthier and better off; the country would have moved some way on the transition away from dependency on fossil energy; fossil fuels and forests would remain unburnt, the latter helping mop up other emissions.
STOP SUBSIDISING NONSENSE.
The irony is that these vast coal-burners would close without the ‘renewable energy’ subsidies for which they lobbied so hard. Biofuelwatch argues that Environmentally Harmful Subsidies should cease and renewable energy should be redefined to exclude those that do more harm than good such as bio-energy and waste for energy. The government has done some of the science but is dragging its feet on implementing it as policy. But it recently removed some of the so called ‘grandfathering’ which guarantees subsidies till a certain date even if it turns out to be doing more harm than good. And the science is more and more showing that to be the case.
We also ask people to divest from bio-energy and to make sure that institutions divesting from Fossil Fuels do not re-invest in Bio-energy.
#AXEDRAX
Drax Power Station has led the way for the industry, lobbying, greenwashing, converting and building the necessary infrastructure, clearcutting hugely biodiverse native forests in the southern US and Canada. Drax is the exemplar of much that is wrong with UK energy policy and renewable energy subsidies. So we are joining with coal campaigners to#AXEDRAX and use the money saved to rethink the way that we do energy, moving beyond burning. Join us leading up to a big demo in April (at the Drax AGM date tbc) in exposing and opposing all the players in this dangerous false solution! Join the London
Biomassive https://www.facebook.com/LondonBiomassive planning to #AXEDRAX seehttp://axedrax.org.uk. For more information on Biomass see the FAQs and other info at http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/biomass-resources/
And make an AXE DRAX pancake today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsk76CDkiQ0
Duncan Law, Biofuelwatch, www.biofuelwatch.org.uk, biofuelwatch@ymail.com